opinion

In the latest instalment of his blog, Freedom Boy Wilson, MP, has posted an article called “My Bookshelf”. It turns out not to be a paean to his philosopher-mentor Bookshelves Brandis, but an encounter with the books that have put his thoughts “onto clear tracks”.

Voluntary assisted dying is strongly opposed by Right To Life Australia through its tried and tested tactics of political intimidation and by framing compassion as “killing” (John Power, “Unwritten endings”, August 5-11). Its website cites the...

Australian politics surely could not get more bizarre than the spectacle of the Turnbull government tearing itself apart this week over what it dismisses as a second-order issue. And it all comes down to the dynamics generated by one embittered man...

The very last picture to be taken of Hamed Shamshiripour is too distressing to publish. It looks like the scene of a lynching. In many respects, it is. Hamed’s face is held in great anguish. Blackness fills the sockets of his eyes. His shoulders hang as if responding to a question for which there is no answer. In death there is the silence that follows great trauma. This last image, this tableau of jungle and resignation, is frozen in violent stillness.

If it weren’t so serious, you might call it irony. As it stands, it’s a grim symbol of how we treat our most vulnerable. This week is national Homelessness Week – a time to raise awareness of people experiencing homelessness and the issues they face...

The account of conditions on Manus Island by Behrouz Boochani (“Breaking camp”, July 29-August 4) shows the cruelty and vicious treatment of the refugees by the Australian government. They are being driven to despair by various deprivations and by...

The right in this country is living inside a poisonous cartoon. So desperate are they to hold a contrary view, they can look at a report into widespread abuse on university campuses and instead of wronged survivors see only ideological enemies.

In the two-and-a-half decades between the publication of his groundbreaking book Orientalism and his death, Edward Said spent considerable energy rejecting claims that his work is a defence of the “real” Islam. Such an assumption, he wrote, “would...

The television spinoff of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is an allegory of life under a type of Abbott-Abetz-Andrews-Bernardi-Shelton totalitarian Christian theonomic regime, run by cold-hearted biblical nutters who have women enslaved and minorities cast into vats of bubbling oil.

In the far south-west of the Australian continent Malcolm Turnbull shared his deepest convictions about himself as the nation’s prime minister. It was in response to a question from a student at Albany Senior High School. With disarming anticipation...

Journalist and naval historian Mike Carlton has come up with the Kenny Awards – prizes for right-wing commentary that might otherwise go unnoticed and ungarlanded. The awards are named after former bag-carrier for Fishnets Downer and Iraq war champion Chris Kenny, who scribbles for The Catholic Boys Daily.